I find it humorous how many recruiters ask questions like:
What is your recruitment strategy?
Do you do social networking, cool Boolean searching techniques, or what about these cool referral engines?

Do not miss-understand, I am not suggesting these tools do not work or that they do not have a place in a recruiters arsenal. But they are not the sole way of finding the best of breed candidates and they certainly are not the most effective.

What is the most effective? What if I told you that in as little as 12 hours you could have the best, most likely to get hired, and most qualified candidates out there? What if I told you, you could do this with every single one of your current searches, putting your candidates to the top of the hiring manager's on site's and at the same time transforming you into the go to recruiter that gets results and not a tri-colored report on why you could not?

What I am about to tell you isn't a service, or a tool, or a dot.com. It's not something you are going to read in a recruiting guru blog and it's not something you are going to find on a social networking site. It doesn't require a log in and or key words.

So what is it? What is the solution? The same solution that has made the best recruiters the best since the 70's. The phone.

Now don't stop reading just because you have a phobia or misconceptions that this is "old school." I myself am not an old recruiter; I have been in the industry for about 6 years. I am and expert at Boolean logic, social networking recruiting, and I have access to every tool under the sun. But when I am in a crunch, and when my hiring managers are calling me needing a miracle. The phone is where I go.

So here are some tips that will prove successful 100% of the time. The results will vary, but the good news is there will actually be "results."

Step 1. Define your list. Name generation is the key. Making sure every call is throwing a dart, not stumbling around in the dark. You can typically use job boards and tools like Linkedin and Zoominfo to get a good skeleton of who's who. Enough to be able to ask the right questions and get to whom you want to speak with.

Step 2. Don't worry about the gatekeeper. They don't care to stop you. If they do, hang up and call the next guy. Worst case scenario reverse the question and throw them off and it wont be a problem. Act like its no big deal and it wont be.

Step 3. Sound like yourself. Just because it's a cold call, you do not need to sound professional. The warmer the approach the better. Remember, if you sound like a Telemarketer, you are one.

Step 4. Just set up the introduction for a more formal conversation on a later date.

Step 5 (and the most important) Make the calls! Even if you are terrible and you make 75 calls a day you will result much higher amount of candidates that are best of breed.

This is a 40,000-foot view, once you start making this a go to tactic for you, you will start to develop what works for you. I challenge you to try it for one week. If you do, I think you will be surprised at how your candidate pipeline will explode.

Learn more about this author, Jonah Manning.
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